Being There (excerpt)

Being There

Eno and Anderson were featured at something called The ImaginationConference in San Francisco this past weekend (June 8), and since I'mthousands of miles away, I was glad HotWired announced a week ahead of timethat they'd be carrying the event live.

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Both Eno and Anderson were concerned at the outset with feeding the art world nuggets mined from pop culture and vice versa. And both have always had a thing for new technologies and how they might be put to art's use.

So it's interesting that while both have evidently been "on the Net" foryears, neither has yet actually produced an artwork there. Instead of being attracted to cyberspace as creative space, both have been drawn to other forms of new media art as evidently more direct extensions of the art they'd been doing in the first place.

Laurie Anderson's early performances featured inventions such as a violinplayed with bow outfitted with magnetic tape. More recently, Anderson has remarked that she likes CD-ROMs because they never end.

Brian Eno's work seems to have had the unique and not insignificant qualitythat those drawn to it were on the Net early on. Before the Web, there were newsgroups and mailing lists built on a nearly fanatic obsession with anything the man did at all.

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Eno is essentially a spontaneous tinkerer, so we may not seean intricately constructed Web site or CD-ROM until the means of theirproduction jive more smoothly with his methods. Further, he's not all thatwild about the computer-to-person experience.

The more I learned about what would actually transpire at the ImaginationConference, the less interested I was in logging into it… Anderson's might be interesting, but diving into the live chat before the event might be even better.

So I did… When I tried to log into the event, however, I discovered I simply wasn't well enough equipped to take it in. The lines were sluggish and the WebVideo,even set at its lowest rate of image delivery, exhausted my patience.

I've got nothing but praise for the intentions behind making an art eventaccessible to the entire globe. The basic idea is one of the aspects theNet gets hyped for, and rightfully so. Content providers, whether thatcontent is art or not, are placed on a level playing field where, armedwith URLs like skeleton keys, anyone can move freely among the beauty andthe bile.

But theory and practice butt heads once again when the technicalrequirements for taking part include add-ons and plug-ins or even certainlevels of bandwidth and processing power most of us don't have access to.… Until practice catches up with theory,reading about it in the next day's morning paper remains the next best thing to being there.

As noted, there are loads of places to go on the Web for more Brian Eno andLaurie Anderson. Conveniently, they're rounded up at Pop. Pop's Gallery, by the way, is shockingly unimpressive, but that's another subject altogether: